Developing Narrative Structure

Effective narration, the telling of stories or recounting of personal experiences, is an art requiring skills that appear crucial for children’s language development and literacy acquisition. Developing Narrative Structure, originally published in 1991, served an important purpose because it pulled together the widely scattered literature in the field, exploring the ways in which oral narrative structure develops in children and how it may be facilitated. It presented new empirical studies of the time, on genres of narrative, the role narrative structure plays in emergent literacy, the relationship between narrative language and autobiographical memory, and ways in which teachers and parents facilitate or hinder children's narrative development. The empirical research presented here draws from diverse groups, including Hispanic, African-American, and Anglo-American children from rural and urban America and Canada. Today it can be read in its historical context.

Allyssa McCabe, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of psychology at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She got her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Virginia in 1980 and has published over a hundred scholarly pieces. She has written scholarly books and articles on children’s narrative development and a trade book for parents called Language Games to Play with your Child. She has conducted interventions with both parents and teachers to improve children’s ability to narrate. She specializes in cultural, as well as developmental, differences in personal narration, working with scholars from many backgrounds to enable the appreciation of many different traditions.

Carole Peterson, was raised in Seattle, Washington, and her educational degrees are from the Universities of Washington (B.Sc.-Hons in Psychology) and Minnesota (Ph.D in Child Psychology). In 1977 she joined the Psychology Department of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada, where she still is. Because of the impact of her research, she has been appointed a University Research Professor by her university as well as elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a prestigious national organization acknowledging academic excellence. Her research has primarily concerned the three areas of narrative skill development, children as eyewitnesses, and childhood amnesia.